For the NHS. For Gaza. "Think different. Think Independent." says Dr Ammar Waraich

In the twenty fifth of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet Dr Ammar Waraich – standing in Birmingham against Labour’s Preet Kaur Gill

Dr Ammar Waraich is standing at the general election as an independent candidate in Birmingham Edgbaston against the Labour Party’s Preet Kaur Gill. On his campaign website, he says:

Political parties have ignored the public for far too long. They are all the same. The interests of the party, of big donors, and of the media are most important to them.

Labour: alienating the public

Waraich spoke to The Canary about how the Labour Party under Keir Starmer has alienated him and others in the constituency:

I used to be a member of the Labour Party and I left after the Keir Starmer interview on LBC. But I was always becoming more suspicious of the party, the way they… unfairly treated Jeremy Corbyn and then the way, after that, they moved away from the values that I believed in…

They became Labour in name only, essentially.

So I was feeling very alienated. I talked to my local Labour Party group that I was a member of, and people were feeling equally despondent… I thought ‘what’s the point?’ The whole point of a democratic exercise should be that the individuals at a local level who are members of the community should be able to have some input in the party, should be able to input into their policymaking or their thinking.

That wasn’t happening. And I just compared that and contrasted that to the idea of the citizens’ assembly.

His Labour opponent, Preet Kaur Gill, has been in charge in recent years. But as Waraich insisted:

She’s won the election twice on the Jeremy Corbyn manifesto. And now that Keir Starmer’s come, she’s kind of U-turned on all her lines and following Keir Starmer without any challenge to his changing of the Labour Party… She abstained from the vote on a ceasefire and that really angered a lot of people.

A lot of the people who’ve joined my team, actually, are also ex-Labour colleagues… They feel that she’s not listening to them.

Dr Ammar Waraich: restoring service to the community and humanity

Dr Ammar Waraich strongly criticised the establishment parties’ support for the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza, saying:

It makes me really sick. It’s inhumane… When it comes to Ukraine, they’re very quick to judge… ‘yeah that’s war crimes’. And for Gaza, ‘oh I don’t know’… Keir Starmer, the human rights lawyer, can’t actually come out and physically utter from his mouth any words of support for the Palestinians or for the ICC and the ICJ.

He also strongly believes in strengthening the community through investment. He spoke about:

Rebuilding and investing in our communities, and one key component of that is actually funding education… There’s teachers leaving in their droves from our schools because they can’t get the appropriate pay…

It’s a facsimile… of the healthcare system in a way because [it’s] the same thing there – overstretched nurses, overstretched physicians and doctors, not being paid enough, really tough working conditions on top, very long hours, and the financial remuneration’s like nowhere near what it should be.

And he insisted on resisting privatisation and protecting the NHS from political power games:

We need to depoliticise NHS funding… if we want, that is, a system that’s free at the point of use. We have to invest in it, we have to be prepared to spend on it, we have to be prepared to move it beyond this party politics.

And finally, we have to resist privatisation in the NHS as well… cos any time the NHS has been… exposed to large private firms that don’t add value and actually reduce the NHS’s capacity, we’ve lost out. The taxpayers have to pay the bill.

Another key area for investment, he stressed, is the environment:

We need a record investment… in the green transition… This investment’s gonna pay off… The investment you put in, you get so much back.

On his website, he specifically outlines his commitments to insulating homes, improving public transport, and protecting water bodies, among many other positive plans for the constituency and country.

Finally, he asserted:

I’m not interested in being parliament’s representative to the people. I want to be the people’s representative to the parliament… It’s been the biggest pleasure actually of this campaign, listening to people. I listen to people anyway as part of my job as a physician, but this is beyond the clinic. This is… understanding problems from a different sphere…

Just listening to people complain about their issues that other people don’t listen to. I wanna hear all of that, I wanna absorb all of that, and I want to make a difference through representing them in parliament… I’m just asking people to think differently, think about the value proposition an independent can offer… Think different. Think Independent.

For more on Waraich’s comments see the full interview on our YouTube channel: